Are You Boring Your Baby?

If you think peekaboo’s going to cut it forever, you might want to think again! A new study shows that babies as young as seven months already know when something’s boring.

Lead by Celeste Kidd of the University of Rochester, the study provides insight into baby cognition and how babies organize and search for information in order to learn. The findings indicate that not only can babies identify what is boring, but also what is too complex, and will rule these things out accordingly.

Kidd’s test group included 72 babies aged seven to eight months and used eye-tracking software to measure attention patterns. The infants looked at a computer screen with activity on it, but as soon as they looked away (which would indicate a loss of interest), the action stopped.

One experiment conducted included having the babies watch video animations of items appearing out of colorful boxes – it was found that if the sequences became too predictable, the babies would look away sooner, but also that if it became too surprising, they would again lose interest.

Infants also learned quickly that they were in control of whether the action on the screen kept going, learning intuitively that if they looked away it would stop and if they looked back it would start.

While the study is small, it does raise some interesting theories on how babies learn – next thing you know, they’ll be stealing our iPads and swapping Sesame Street for the latest episodes of political dramas!

Did your baby bore easily of the same old toys, games and cartoons? Let us know what you think of these findings in the SureBaby comments!